Letter of Support from Rt. Rev. Laurie Denman, CFO

I am the Chief Financial Officer of WitchSchool International, serving since WSI became the seminary of the Correllian Nativist Tradition through Correllian Educational Ministries (CEM) in September 2015. I would like to share with you why we need your support to generate the needed resources to upgrade the WSI site, $20,000. This call to action is not one we take lightly or without serious consideration. The software underlying the WSI site is no longer being supported by the vendor. To continue our mission, we MUST rebuild and we can’t do that without your support.

As the CEM outreach program and through our original WSI vision of providing a Pagan education, anywhere, anytime, to all who seek knowledge, we provide FREE Basic memberships which allows access to dozens of basic courses at WSI for FREE. The vast majority of our members utilize these FREE Basic Memberships. Only around 5.5% of our student accounts have contributed financially to the services provided by WSI via purchasing a Lifetime Membership or a recurring Supporting Membership. This number has been consistent since I began volunteering with WSI as the Membership Volunteer in October of 2016. These Lifetime or Supporting members have access to all courses offered at WSI. In addition to the courses, all members are eligible to enjoy our social site, TheDailySpell.com (TDS), and for courses that require mentors, they can develop close personal relationships with experienced teachers and clergy that can form bonds that last a lifetime. All of these mentors are volunteers.

CEM’s financials are pretty simple. We generate revenue through our Lifetime and Supporting Memberships. While we do offer advertising banners on our WSI site, most of the banners are also being provided for FREE to Correllian Shrines, Temples or Orders. Advertising income is minimal. The membership revenue generated then supports all the missions of CEM. These include not only the WSI and TDS websites, but also MagickTV and Pagans Tonight Radio Network. The website expenses include domain registrations, server platforms, Ning for TDS, contractor fees for programmer and marketing consultants, along with event registrations and travel expenses for WSI leadership appearances across the US to promote WSI. MagickTV provides in depth interviews and event coverage gathered during the various promotional appearances of the WSI leadership team. There are equipment and software expenses associated with generating these videos. Pagans Tonight Radio Network delivers hours of Pagan programming nightly through Blog Talk Radio, which charges significant fees to access that service. All of our station staff and hosts are volunteers.

Since so many of our members enjoy all of these services for FREE, there is not enough revenue generated to be used during critical times such as the WSI Site Rewrite. Hence, our call to action for the efforts to raise $20,000 needed to upgrade the software used for the site to one that will be supported by the software vendor going forward. Through this complete rewrite we also have the opportunity to improve the ease of navigation of the site and add additional courses for our students. Please support these critical needs by making a donation or becoming a WSI Supporting Member today! The link to do so is provided below.